Technical Field
The claimed subject matter relates generally to virtual universes and, more specifically, to a method for authenticating and authorizing a user within a virtual universe.
Description of the Related Art
The advent of the internet during the 1990's opened up new avenues of communication among computer users around the world. Both personal users and businesses established identities on the Internet for both recreation and commercial reasons. During the past two decades, traffic on the Internet has increased exponentially and available context has expanded into areas that were previously either unimagined or impossible. One such context is the development of virtual universes (“VUs”), one example of which is the Second Life platform (“SL”), supported by Linden Research, Inc., or, “Linden Labs,” of San Francisco, Calif. Other examples include Entropia Universe, Sims Online, There, Red Light Center as well as massively multiplayer games such as EverQuest, Ultima Online, Lineage and World of Warcraft.
Basically, a VU is an Internet-based simulated environment in which users interact via “avatars,” or computer representations of a user. Often a VU resembles the real world with respect to such things as physics and object, e.g. houses and landscapes. Other terms for a VU are a “metaverse” and “3D Internet.” VU users are presented with perceptual stimuli and typically are able to both manipulate elements of the VU and communicate with other users via the avatars. Many VUs even have their own economies in which users exchange virtual dollars for goods and services. Between the founding of SL in 2003 and March of 2008, approximately 13 million users have registered. In addition, VU business and other types of offices have been introduced. In fact, Sweden opened an embassy in SL in 2007.
Other functions have been proposed and await structure and governance similar to environments outside of the VU. One such use is the management and control of real-world resources using an avatar in a VU working with a virtual interface. Currently users authenticate to a VU with traditional user name/password credentials.
The following definitions explain a few of the basic concepts of a VU:                Avatar: VU user's representation of him or herself in the VU that other users can see, often taking the form of a cartoon-like human.        Agent: particular user's account, upon which the user can build an avatar and which is tied to an inventory of assets owned by the user.        Region: virtual area of land within a VU, typically residing upon a single computer server.        
Assets, avatars, the VU environment and anything visual within a VU is associated with a unique identifier (UUID) tied to geometric data, which is distributed to users as textual coordinates, textures, which are distributed as graphics files, and effects data, which are rendered by a user's client process according to the user's preferences and the user's device capabilities.